PREFACE.

Whether it was worth the effort to bring back into the light what no man had revisited since the year 1533 may justly be doubted by one who thinks this depended only upon someone's will and not upon the opportunity given by circumstances. Now, the first person who published the commentaries of Proclus, Simon Grynaeus, aided by only one manuscript—which he says the honorable Joannes Claymundus provided to him at Oxford—approached the task quite boldly. For they had been published, to use the words of Barocius, as if they had never been published at all. And the same complaint sounds from the books of those who were eager to read in Greek what Proclus had handed down, whether concerning the tenets of philosophy or concerning mathematical or geometric matters, which he himself, both as a philosopher and a geometer, had set forth in these commentaries.

Barocius came to their aid in a remarkable way, clarifying the more difficult parts, correcting the erroneous, filling in the gaps, adding what was missing, and translating everything into Latin. The same man, had he wished, seems to have been able to restore the Greek Proclus. For he praises it as a work of divine providence that a very ancient manuscript came into his hands on the island of Crete, from which manuscript—itself imperfect in many places—he says he diligently corrected the printed version as much as he could. Upon traveling to Bologna, he found two handwritten copies: one in the library of San Salvatore and another in the library of Fabricius Garzonius, who publicly taught medicine at the Bologna Gymnasium. From all these copies, he made one complete version as far as was possible, which he translated from the Greek language into Latin.